Food Loss & Waste Reduction
Don't just manage food waste – stop wasting it in the first place
Food Loss & Waste Prevention Overview
The video excerpt below is from a Loblaw’s PC Insiders series entitled “Half Full” (we encourage you to watch the full video here and to check out the other excellent videos in this series). In this excerpt, Bruce Taylor provides a great overview of the benefits of food loss & waste prevention.
Award-Winning Results
Enviro-Stewards Inc. is the proud recipient of a Clean50 Award, which is an award created and stewarded by Delta Management that honours and connects outstanding contributors to sustainable development and clean capitalism in Canada. Our nomination for a Top Clean Capital Project in Canada for 2020 was made by the Walmart Foundation and Provision Coalition and highlights the prevention assessments completed by our team at 50 food and beverage processors across Canada.
Through our work, we found measures to eliminate $11.2 million dollars’ worth of food loss via production alone.
Collectively, the assessments found measures to save:
- 9.3 million kg/yr of food (if you filled cloth grocery bags and lined up the narrow sides, this would produce a 180 km line of grocery bags from the CN tower to London, Ontario)
- Alternatively, there are 30,000 homeless people in Canada; this would be enough food to provide each of them with 500 meals per year
Environmentally, not wasting this food would save 32,600 tonnes of embedded CO2 emissions each year. This is equivalent to taking 7,000 cars off the road. And shockingly, the manufacturing plants would save $350 for every tonne of GHG that they avoid (in addition to any carbon tax savings).
The assessments found an average of $230,000 of annual savings per facility with a payback of less than one year. This is enough to materially improve the competitiveness and profitability of each of these facilities.
For example, as covered by the CBC, CEC, and the environmental commissioner of Ontario, beverage loss prevention at Beau’s Brewery will save $722,000/yr of beer, avoid 600 tonnes of GHG and nearly double the profit of this employee owned brewery.
Although the 3rd largest GHG emitter on the planet receives little attention, it can produce sustainable prosperity, help end hunger, protecting species, and deliver on climate action.
Ensure that more ingredients and finished goods leave the line as saleable product and not through the dumpster.
Enviro-Stewards’ approach is unlike that of most consultants. Instead of performing a traditional solid waste audit with a specific focus on finding the best location for your dumpster contents, we examine the root causes leading to waste in order to develop innovative and sustainable solutions.
In Canada, the equivalent of 30 – 40% of the food produced is lost along the value chain. This food waste is worth an estimated $27 billion each year. Traditional solid waste audits find homes for this food waste at margin value of plus $20 to minus $100 per tonne. However, this approach fails to recognize that, just before it was lost during processing, the food was valued at plus $1,000 – $15,000 per tonne.
Rather than focusing on ways to manage your food waste by finding efficient ways to destroy the food, we will develop solutions to reduce or eliminate wasted food in the first place.
Enviro-Stewards takes a holistic approach and conducts a full-spectrum assessment and implementation focused on prevention, resource conservation, and improving your bottom line.
Our unique approach to reduce food waste during the manufacturing process will ensure that more ingredients and finished goods leave the line as saleable product and not through the dumpster.
We develop and implement solutions to achieve substantial waste reductions with an average payback of less than 1 year.
Food Waste Reduction Success story
After completing a conventional solid waste audit, Campbell Canada wanted to improve their food loss + waste (FLW) prevention processes. They collaborated in a pilot project to apply the Provision Coalition’s FLW Reduction Toolkit (based on Enviro-Stewards’ approach) with a FLW Prevention Assessment conducted by Enviro-Stewards.
Enviro-Stewards conducted a root-cause analysis to develop cost-effective prevention strategies and solutions. The pilot project identified practical and economically-attractive opportunities to avoid food waste and increase the yield of the factory by 938 tonnes/yr with a product value of $706,000 and a payback period of less than six months.
Although their facility was previously sending food waste to a waste to energy plant, not wasting the food in the first place results in the reduction of 4,000 tonnes/yr greenhouse gas emissions compared with their prior disposal method. The project was selected as the Top Sustainability Project in Canada for 2018.
“Seeing this value to our business, we will continue to focus on these initiatives and maintain strong partnerships with experts like Enviro-Stewards, enabling us to stay current with customer expectations, be competitive in our production processes, and be innovative among industry, with our commitment to sustainability practices.”, said John Lillard, Project Leader Research & Development, Campbell Company of Canada.
Enviro-Stewards is dedicated to the development of innovative solutions to achieve long-term resource and financial sustainability for businesses.
Stop wasting resources and boost your yield.